YouTube is updating its recommendations engine, saying it wants to make sure its suggesting videos people actually want to watch.
It follows complaints from users that the videos they were being suggested were all too similar.
The company says its last major work was to prevent clickbait videos with misleading titles and descriptions from surfacing. This was achieved by focussing on viewer satisfaction instead of views. This includes the measure of likes, dislikes, surveys, and time well spent.
It now wants to look at how it can reduce the spread of content that’s deemed to be on the edges of its Community Guidelines.
The plan is to reduce the amount of videos that promote false cures for illness or make “blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11”. It’s estimated that less than 1% of videos seen on the video-sharing platform would be affected.
YouTube stressed that the changes would affect only those videos that appear on the platform itself and all videos that met its current guidelines would continue to be made available.
